THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

The Fleet was huge! Records indicated it had never exceeded four score junqs; now there were seven score, and another score of younglings followed behind, secured with hawsers made of spuder-web until they were safely broken. Each of the adults carried an enormous haodah beset with edible funqi and other useful secondary plants, and each haodah was as warm with people, from those so old their mantles were shrunken with age down to children who could not yet stand upright, and nonetheless clambered with infinite confidence from pole to creeper to outlying float.

“It looks more like a mobile city than a Fleet!” marveled Yockerbow, and he was not alone.

And the resemblance was magnified a scorefold when, responding to a perfectly drilled system of signals issued by gongs and banners, the junqs closed on the place allotted for their mooring and came to rest, prow against stern, so that one might walk dry-padded from each to the next and finally, by way of the leading junq, to shore.

“That must be Barratong!” Arranth exclaimed, surveying the wondrous spectacle through a borrowed spyglass.

“Where?” Yockerbow demanded. Passing the glass to him, she pointed out a tall, burly fellow at the prow of the lead junq.

“I think not,” Yockerbow said after a pause.

“What? Oh, you’re always contradicting me!” She stamped her pad.

“He doesn’t match the descriptions,” was his mild reply. “The person directly behind him does.”

“Are you sure? He looks so—so ordinary!”

And it was true. Apart from combining northern shortness with a southerner’s pale mantle, he looked in no way exceptional, but he wore crossed baldrics from which depended the ancient symbols of his rank, a spyglass and an old-style steersman’s goad, and his companions deferred to him even in their posture.

The Doq and the eight peers were waiting for him, surrounded by their entire retinue, and moved to greet him the moment he climbed down from the junq. After that he was invisible from where Yockerbow and Arranth stood, and the group moved off towards the Doqal Hall where a grand reception had been prepared.

“We should be going with them!” Arranth said accusingly. “If you’d asked Iddromane like I suggested, I’m sure he—”

Yockerbow fixed her with a rock-hard glare.

“No! Am I to wait on him, like a humble underling? Has it not occurred to you, my dear, that he is coming to see me?”

Her eye widened enormously. After a moment she began to laugh.

“Oh, my clever spouse! Of course you’re right! It’s much more remarkable like that! It’s going to make us famous!”

As if we weren’t already … But it didn’t matter. He had made his point, and there was work to do.

It was not long before the mood of excitement generated by the Fleet’s arrival started to give way to annoyance. This was not because the visitors were discourteous or rapacious; they traded honestly for what they found on offer, and conducted themselves with tolerable good manners albeit some of them, especially those who hailed from the distant south, had very different customs.

More, it was that they seemed somewhat patronizing about even the best that Ripar had to show, and in this they took after the admiral himself. Blunt, plain-spoken, he refused to be as impressed as the peers expected by anything about the city, including its alleged antiquity, for— as he declared in tones that brooked no denial—his Fleet could trace its origins back to within a score-score years of the inception of the Freeze, when briq-commanders from the west were storm-driven into what was for them a new ocean and found not wild briqs but wild junqs, which none before them had thought to try and tame, yet which proved far superior: more intelligent and more docile, not requiring to be pithed. He even had the audacity to hint that Ripar had probably been a settlement planted by the early seafarers, and that contradicted all the city’s legends.

He compounded his offense when, having enjoyed the greatest honor they could bestow on him and been inducted to the Order of the Jingfired, he made it unmistakably plain that that too was delaying fulfillment of his chief purpose in calling here: inspection of Yockerbow’s pumping-system.

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